Plain Words (16 page)

The following introductory sentence to a circular is, I think, wholly padding, but I cannot be sure, for I can find no meaning in it:

The proposals made in response to this request show differences of approach to the problem which relate to the differing recommendations of the Committee's Report, and include some modifications of those recommendations.

But padding is too multifarious for analysis. It can only be illustrated, and the one rule for avoiding it is to be self-critical.

Note.
The style of some of Gowers's bad examples above may now sound outmoded (‘I am to add that, doubtless, local authorities appreciate that it is a matter of prime importance that …'). But officials still resort to padding. A recent paper issued by the Ministry of Justice on ‘cost protection for litigants in environmental judicial review claims' states ‘in respect of' appeals that ‘It should be noted in this context that it will not necessarily be the claimant who has appealed …'. Here, ‘it should be noted in this context that' is pure ‘wrapping of woolly words'.

Sometimes the padding in a sentence appears to have arrived
there through simple fear of a blank page. Certainly the advertising puff below, reproduced in numerous tableware catalogues, bespeaks torment on the part of a writer with not much to say. The puff attempts to champion Blue Denmark, an antique plate pattern by the Staffordshire potters, Johnson Brothers:

Historically, blue and white ceramic design dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries—this is sufficient evidence itself to recognise the reason why Blue Denmark continues its long reign.

To put ‘historically' at the start here adds nothing. To say ‘18th and 19th' is perverse. And to end on ‘continues its long reign' is an overblown metaphorical flourish. But to take ‘this is why' and pad it with the words ‘sufficient evidence itself to recognise the reason' is almost surreally illiterate. Unscrambled, what this sentence has told us is the following: ‘China patterns in blue and white date from the eighteenth century. This explains why Blue Denmark remains popular'. It is no great surprise to find that neither of these statements is true. ~

Boswell says of Johnson: ‘He seemed to take pleasure in speaking in his own style; for when he had carelessly missed it, he would repeat the thought translated into it. Talking of the comedy of “The Rehearsal,” he said, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.” This was easy;—he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more rounded sentence: “It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction” '. The mind of another famous lover of the rotund phrase worked the opposite way: ‘ “Under the impression,” said Mr Micawber, “that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road,—in short,” said Mr Micawber, in another burst of confidence, “that you might lose yourself —” '. Officials should not hesitate over which of these remarkable men to take as their model. They should cultivate Mr Micawber's praiseworthy habit of instinctively translating the out-of-the-way
into the everyday. Thus we might find that, even though the Board of Trade could still not resist announcing that certain surplus government factories are now ‘available for reallocation', they would not leave it at that. ‘In short,' they would add in a burst of confidence, ‘they are to be relet.'

The present inclination of officials is in the opposite direction. They are Johnsonians rather than Micawberites,
*
and so handicap themselves in achieving what we have seen to be their primary object as writers: to affect the reader precisely as they wish. The simple reader is puzzled. The sophisticated one is annoyed. Here is pent-up annoyance blowing off a genial jet of steam in the leading columns of
The Times
:

some foreign importations have shown a terrifying and uncontrollable vitality, so that the sins of their original sponsors are visited with dreadful rigour upon succeeding generations. The kindly nature-lover who first liberated a pair of grey squirrels has a great deal to answer for, including a large share of the salaries of numerous civil servants engaged on the task known to them, rather hopefully, as pest-elimination. In the etymological field a similar bad eminence is reserved in the minds of all right-thinking men, for the individual who first introduced into the English language the word ‘personnel'. It is possible,
just possible, that a more degrading, a more ill-favoured synonym for two or more members of the human race has at one time or another been coined; but, if it has, it has never gained the ubiquitous and tyrannical currency of this alien collective.
*

It would be churlish to accuse an onslaught so disarming of not being quite fair. But may it not be argued that when we admitted women auxiliaries to our armed forces the expression ‘men and material' became unsuitable; and that we found a gap in our vocabulary and sensibly filled it, as we have so often done before, by borrowing from the French? Still, it cannot be denied that this word, like so many other high-sounding words of vague import, has exercised an unfortunate fascination over the official mind. The mischief of words of this sort is that they become such favourites that they seduce their users from clarity of thought. They mesmerise them and numb their discrimination.

The precept to choose the familiar word (which is probably also the short word) must of course be followed with discretion. Many wise figures throughout the centuries, from Aristotle to Sir Winston Churchill, have emphasised the importance of using short and simple words. But no one knew better than these two authorities that sacrifice either of precision or of dignity is too high a price to pay for the familiar word. If the choice is between two words that convey the writer's meaning equally well, one
short and familiar and the other long and unusual, of course the short and familiar should be preferred. But one that is long and unusual should not be rejected merely on that account if it is more apt in meaning. Sir Winston does not hesitate to choose the uncommon word if there is something to be gained by it. If we were to ask whether there was any difference in meaning between
woolly
and
flocculent
we should probably say no: one was commonplace and the other unusual, and that was all there was to it. But Sir Winston, in the first volume of his
Second World War
, uses
flocculent
instead of
woolly
to describe the mental processes of certain people, and so conveys to his readers just that extra ounce of contempt that we feel
flocculent
to contain (perhaps because the combination of
f
and
l
so often expresses an invertebrate state, as in
flop
,
flap
,
flaccid
,
flimsy
,
flabby
and
filleted
). Moreover there is an ugliness of shortness as well as an ugliness of length. On the same day in different daily papers I have seen the same official referred to as ‘Administrator of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation', and as ‘Aid Boss'. Neither title is euphonious, but few would unhesitatingly prefer the short one.

Still, there are no great signs at present of an urgent need to warn against the overuse of simple diction by officials. In official documents, lack of precision is much more likely to arise from the use of jargon and legal language, and from an addiction to showy words.

The
OED
defines
jargon
as being a word ‘applied contemptuously to any mode of speech abounding in unfamiliar terms, or peculiar to a particular set of persons, as the language of scholars or philosophers, the terminology of a science or art, or the cant of a class, sect, trade, or profession'. When it is confined to that sense,
it is a useful word. But it has been handled so promiscuously of recent years that the edge has been taken off it, and now, as has been well said, it signifies little more than any speech that people feel to be inferior to their own. In the original sense its growth of late has been alarming. Modern discoveries in the older sciences, and the need of the newer ones to explain their ideas, have led to an enormous increase in that part of our vocabulary that can be classed as jargon. No doubt this is to some extent inevitable. New concepts may demand new words. The discipline of psychology, for example, can at least plead that if a new word is necessary for what my most recent dictionary defines as ‘the sum total of the instinctive forces of an individual', a less pretentious one could hardly have been found than
id
—and never can so much meaning have been packed into so small a space since the sentence, ‘Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians', was compressed into the word
Upharsin
.
*
But I find it refreshing when the evolutionary biologist Dr Julian Huxley says:

We need a term for the sum of these continuities through the whole of evolutionary time, and I prefer to take over a familiar word like
progress
instead of coining a special piece of esoteric jargon. (
Evolution in Action
, 1953)

In the field of neurology Sir Francis Walshe has been provoked to a similar protest. Referring to the fondness of clinicians for
inventing new words for newly observed symptoms that may throw light on the mysteries of cerebral physiology, he says:

Thus one phenomenon may have close on a dozen neologisms attached to it, and these are not always used with precision. All this has made for confusion, for it needs heroic virtues to plunge into the muddy waters of the relevant literature to pluck out truth from their depths.

Even precise words are of no use where they cannot be understood. A report in the
Evening Standard
tells how a Dr M. described the condition of a man embroiled in a Southwark court case as ‘bilateral periorbital haematoma and left subconjunctival haemorrhage'. When asked what this meant, he said, ‘Two lovely black eyes'.

When officials are accused of writing jargon, what is generally meant is that they affect a pompous and flabby verbosity. This is not what I mean. What I have in mind is that technical terms are used—especially conventional phrases invented by a government department—that are understood inside the department but are unintelligible to outsiders. This is true jargon. A circular from the headquarters of a department to its regional officers begins:

The physical progressing of building cases should be confined to …

Without the key, nobody could say what meaning this was intended to convey. It is English only in the sense that the words are English words, but they have become a group of symbols used in conventional senses known only to parties to the convention. It may be said that no harm is done, because the instruction is not meant to be read by anyone unfamiliar with the departmental jargon. But using jargon is a dangerous habit. It is easy to forget that members of the public do not understand it, and to slip into
the use of it in explaining things to them. If that is done, those seeking enlightenment will find themselves plunged in even deeper obscurity. A member of the department has kindly given me this interpretation of the note quoted above, qualified by the words, ‘as far as I can discover':

‘The physical progressing of building cases' means going at intervals to the sites of factories, etc., whose building is sponsored by the department and otherwise approved to see how many bricks have been laid since the last visit. ‘Physical' here apparently exemplifies a portmanteau usage … and refers both to the flesh-and-blood presence of the inspector and to the material development of the edifice, neither of which is, however, mentioned. ‘Progressing', I gather, should have the accent on the first syllable and should be distinguished from pro
gress
ing. It means recording or helping forward the progress rather than going forward. ‘Cases' is the common term for units of work which consist of applying a given set of rules to a number of individual problems … ‘should be confined to' means that only in the types of cases specified may an officer leave his desk to visit the site.

Let us take another example. ‘Distribution of industry policy' is an expression well understood in the Board of Trade and other departments concerned with the subject. But it is jargon. Intrinsically the phrase has no certain meaning. Not even its grammatical construction is clear. So far as the words go, it is at least as likely that it refers to distributing something called ‘industry-policy' as to a policy of distributing industry. Even when we know that ‘distribution-of-industry' is a compound noun-adjective qualifying
policy
, we still do not give the words the full meaning that those who invented the phrase intended it to have. The esoteric meaning attached to it is ‘the policy of exercising governmental control over the establishment of new factories in such a way as to minimise the risk of local mass
unemployment'. No doubt it is convenient to have a label for anything that can only be explained so cumbrously. But it must not be forgotten that what is written on the label consists of code symbols unintelligible to the outsider. Forgetfulness of this kind causes perplexity and irritation. A judge recently said that he could form no idea of what was meant by the sentence: ‘These prices are basis prices per ton for the representative-basis-pricing specification and size and quantity'; and the
Manchester Guardian
was once moved to describe the sense of despair produced by a document from the Ministry of Supply, quoted below, purporting to explain a (genuine) simplification in planning:

The sub-authorisations required by its sub-contractors to re-authorise their orders as in (I) and (II) above. It should be borne in mind that sub-contractors may need re-authorisation not only of sub-authorisations already given for period II and beyond, but also for sub-authorisations of earlier periods, so as to revalidate orders or parts of orders as in (I).

Single words are sometimes given a special meaning for official purposes. This was especially true of words much used during the war. At a time when our lives were regulated at every turn by the distinction between what was and what was not ‘essential', that word sprouted curiously. Its development can be traced through these three quotations:

I can only deal with applications of a highly essential nature.

It is impossible to approve importations from the USA unless there is a compelling case of essentiality.

It is confirmed that as a farmer you are granted high essentiality.